Are the Tsarnaev Brothers Russian?

There are few things that today’s Russia enjoys more than the sense, real or imagined, of its own centrality to all world events. But ever since this morning, when the planet’s biggest headline—the Boston marathon bombing and its violent aftermath—landed in Russia’s lap, the reaction here has been utter confusion. The case of the two suspects, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, born in Kyrgyzstan to a Chechen family and brought up in Dagestan and the United States, is forcing everyone to consider a painfully inconvenient question: What, exactly, makes one a Russian?

The conundrum is well-known to any Soviet or post-Soviet immigrant in the States. (As the writer Lara Vapnyar put it, “In the United States, I was finally granted the identity I had been denied my whole life. Here I became a Russian.”) Is it the language that makes one Russian? Both Tsarnaevs spoke Russian, English, and Chechen; Dzhokhar’s online imprint suggests equal command of the first two. Is it citizenship? The Russian Consulate in New York hastened to announce that the suspects had never registered there, and a source at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow says that at least one brother, Tamerlan, was a citizen of Kyrgyzstan. Is it Russia’s unofficially official state religion, Orthodox Christianity? Both brothers were Muslim, but so are seven per cent of all people living in Russia. What is it, then—an account in VKontakte, the Russian Facebook clone? Are the Tsarnaevs “ours” or not, and exactly how responsible should Russia feel for producing them or their brand of violence? “Forgive us, Americans, for having fostered here and sent to you these evident terrorists,” wrote Vladimir Varfolomeev, of the radio station Echo of Moscow, as soon as the news broke. This sentiment is not about the Tsarnaevs at all, who, after all, moved to the U.S. in early childhood. It’s about Chechnya.

The North Caucasus nation has been under Russian rule since the eighteenth century, but has lunged for independence at almost any historical opportunity, with each attempt brutally quashed. Joseph Stalin, who hailed from nearby Georgia, tried to weaken Chechen nationalism by deporting hundreds of thousands of Chechens to Central Asia. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Air Force general Dzhohar Dudaev had briefly succeeded in establishing the quasi-rogue Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. The Russians responded with two wars, in 1994 and 1999, levelling the Chechen capital and, later, installing a Putin puppet in Ramzan Kadyrov, a former rebel who had switched sides. An entire generation of Chechens has grown up knowing only war. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, born in 1994, was a newborn when the Chechen-Russian conflict started, and fifteen when the insurgency died down.

By Putin’s third term, money has accomplished what slaughter couldn’t. Chechnya and the neighboring Dagestan receive enormous amounts of federal aid. The fully rebuilt Grozny glistens with new mosques and skyscrapers; Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, boasts a lavishly funded soccer team, Anzhi. The prickly North Caucasian spirit has turned into a bizarre combination of outsize loyalty to Moscow (Chechnya regularly provides unrealistically high vote tallies for Putin’s United Russia party) atop a near-Sharia fiefdom running largely unchecked. In Moscow, North Caucasians have acquired a complicated double status as a poor persecuted minority and a rich unprosecutable one: those with ties to Kadyrov or a direct line to the federal trough are routinely placed above the Russian law, which in turn provokes Russian nationalists to lash out at all Chechens. In the Russian culture, this triumphant Chechen assumes the place of the Other, a Russian’s persistent dark twin, vacated by the departed Jew.

Kadyrov himself disowns the Tsarnaevs, noting that “one should look for the roots of evil in America,” a sentence that will surely please his patron Putin; in fact, it’s hard to escape the feeling that Kadyrov is speaking here as a freewheeling Putin surrogate. The Kremlin has issued no reaction so far. More resonant was how, a few hours after the news of the suspects’ identities hit, a much-reproduced Russian tweet claimed that the top trending topic in the U.S. was #FuckingRussians. That was a lie; it was simply #DzhokharTsarnaev. (In third place: #ReplaceBandNamesWithPizza. Life goes on). But the lie itself was telling. For many in Russia, “ownership” of the Tsarnaevs in the eyes of the world is the nightmare scenario, because it means finally owning up to kinship with the Caucasus and all its trouble.